How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Content and Generate Leads

by

brianpappalardo

A lot of companies get really confused about social media. I see several companies who use social media as a bullhorn to yell as loud as they can about their services or products, and I also see a lot of companies post memes to try to be relevant. Few organizations are able to tie back their social activity to any kind of revenue or lead generation goal.

In this article, we’ll look at how social media can be used to promote the content that you’re writing as part of your Inbound Marketing strategy.

Like most tools in your Inbound Marketing tool belt, your social media strategy should start with a solid understanding of your personas and their Buyer’s Journey. If you haven’t already created Buyer Personas and mapped out their Buyer’s Journey, then it may be beneficial to read our article How to Create a Buyer Persona for Your Business [and free tools to help], download the free template then come back to this article.

Once you have your personas and buyer’s journey, you should have all the tools you need to create a content marketing strategy. Think of your social media accounts as one (very effective) way to promote that content.

Many people have the misconception that they can only share a link once on social media, and that’s simply not true. In addition to all your usual social media banter that your company should be doing to stay relevant, use it as a platform for promoting your content. If someone has a question about your company or service and you’ve written a blog post about it, give them the short answer in your response and link to the blog post for them to read more. Write posts that say, “Did you know, 40% of people XYZ. Find out more here” and link to a blog post.

Whenever you write an ‘evergreen’ blog post – a post that has information in it that will be relevant in the next several years to come – schedule a post across all your platforms to promote. Then schedule a series of additional posts pointing to that same content – 2 weeks after posting, 2 months after posting, 6 months after posting and 1 year after posting.

At the beginning of each year, run a report to determine which posts were the most effective. Look at social metrics like engagements – likes, comments, shares – and also look at ROI metrics. How many leads were generated, and how much revenue came from your social activity? Then schedule several posts each month that point to some of your highest performing content. Do you have a blog post that has a really high CTR or is generating more revenue than the rest? Schedule several posts to publish throughout the year that talk about how that post can help your followers.

How to Prove ROI for social media

If you have the budget, use a tool like HubSpot to schedule your posts and listen for chatter around your brand and industry. The biggest benefit in using a tool like this is that you can create a campaign that consists of an offer, a landing page, a call to action, several blog posts, and a bunch of social posts. You can then quickly pull a report to see how each part of that campaign performed and optimize accordingly.

Hopefully, this will get your mind racing with new ideas for promoting your content, and it can help you prove ROI for a medium that is traditionally hard to see a clear return on.

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